Margaret Jenkins sits in front of a large mirror as she watches the start of her new dance. Choreographer Margaret Jenkins has just finished her latest dance called "Other Sons (a trilogy)" and works with her dancers on the first part in her San Francisco studio Thursday September 3, 2009.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

Margaret Jenkins sits in front of a large mirror as she watches the...

For Jenkins, it has been a process of more than two years that has taken her company of eight dancers to Guangzhou, China, in 2008 and back home as they worked on the tripartite work, which encompasses a section created by each company and a collaborative finale. As she prepared for the Chinese dancers' arrival in San Francisco, a moment in the quiet studios on Eighth and Folsom streets found her in a characteristically reflective mood.

Q:Where does the title "Other Suns" come from?

A: One of the many things that has been so striking and so moving with all the cross-cultural work and intercontinental travel that I've done over the last several years is how one can use one's art to be in dialogue and in communication with people from another culture. How much more deeply you can come to understand another people by actually doing your work, as opposed to being on the tourist bus that takes you to the highlights. I think sometimes we act as a people as if we have something grand to impart to another people, but something that I realized when I started working so deeply in China was that, even though we live very differently from one another, we all live under the same sun.

Q:Can you talk about how your collaborative method worked with the dancers of the Guangdong company?

A: In terms of the collaboration, I don't think there's anyone who really works the way I do. And I say that knowing a lot of choreographers who collaborate with their dancers, and with great respect for the fact that they really mean it. It's not that I think what I do is better, I just think it's more intricate. The MJDC dancers really generate all the material in response to ideas that we all come up with. And while I play a very important role in terms of editing and directing where a piece is going, these dancers are really choreographers, they aren't just dancers in this work.

I think that the Chinese dancers have been asked to do things with movement by Liu Qi - the deputy artistic director of GMDC - to make it their own, but I don't think they have been so intricately involved conceptually in its development before, so it's very new territory for them. It was new to them to make a work based on what felt like such abstract concepts as asymmetry or symmetry, off balance or fragility.

And the translation issue was just gigantic. Imagine trying to convey in another language to a group of people, "When that group over there gets halfway down, then you three come in here and you two come in here and then you make a little do-si-do and go back." Well ... two hours later ...

Q:What was it like when you went back in March to see the section they had worked out on their own?

A: I felt very touched about how much they had paid attention to what we all did together - how much of what we did, the movement that they used, the ideas that were inherent to what we did together - really came out in their choreography. One of the things that's very exciting, but very challenging, about this is the question of what world did we enter? What stories did we leave, what lessons did we learn? What did we take back with us, what did they feel we left behind? I'm so ready to find out what we have.